Open WindowsReview

Nacho Vigalondo’s fortuitously topical thriller Open Windows rests entirely on a gimmick that at times borders on the absurd. Somewhere between 1984 and The Matrix, Open Windows exists in an improbable realm of techno fiction that edges closer to fantasy than present day reality. It relies on tired clichés and overlooks common sense logic, often breaking its own made-up rules in the process. Yet, for all that, it’s well-paced, smartly directed and thoroughly suspenseful.

After an amusing movie-within-a-movie intro, we meet our protagonist, Nick (Elijah Wood, who seems to have settled in nicely atop the indie genre film food chain in recent years). In Open Windows, he's a perfect fit as the awkward, mousy proprietor of a tawdry fan-site dedicated to rising Hollywood starlet Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey).

When we first see Nick he's sitting anxiously in a hotel room, his worried brow a constantly shifting mass of nervous furrows, his shirt neatly buttoned all the way to the top. He’s won some sort of blogger contest, the prize for which is a dinner date with the object of his affections. As is the case in so many thrillers of this sort, things get interesting when Nick receives a mysterious phone call from a stranger who knows far more than he should. The caller (Kill List's Neil Maskell) identifies himself as Chord and claims to be the webmaster for Jill’s latest blockbuster. He regretfully informs Nick that he won’t be going on his date with Jill after all. Unfortunately for Nick, that disappointing news isn't even close to the worst thing Chord has in store for him.

The gimmick that dominates the first 90% of this movie is that every scene is framed in one or more windows on Nick’s laptop. Literally all of them. From video clips of Jill’s movie to static shots from security cameras to third-person recordings of the big action set-pieces that follow. Regardless of how it’s being captured, all the footage we see is supposed to be appearing on Nick’s screen.

If that sounds a little constricting, that’s because it is. But Vigalondo stretches the conceit with liberal amounts of pan and zoom. Sliding between windows functions like cutting from scene to scene. It’s a contrivance, but it’s so fluid it becomes easy to forget about the approach altogether. Sometimes it even yields an artificial continuity, making it seem like the whole thing is happening in real time without any cuts at all.

That’s the upside of the computer display arrangement. The downside is that, clever though it may be, in reality it would be impossible to maintain. Because everything we see is supposedly appearing on Nick’s monitor, his laptop must necessarily stay open, connected to the Internet and functional at all times. This isn’t a problem while Nick is in his hotel room, snapping screengrabs of Jill’s webcast. But when he flees said hotel room he has to take his computer with him. Leaving aside how vastly superior his machine's battery life is compared to most computers running multiple resource-intensive applications at once, this still seems implausible. He never even loses his Internet connection, though his path takes him down an elevator and into the hotel's basement garage.

Though we’re never explicitly instructed to do so, it may be best to think of Open Windows as taking place in the near future. That would certainly go a long way toward explaining fantastical tech like Chord’s magical “ping-pong cameras”, self-contained, baseball-sized devices that can see through walls and generate real-time, three-dimensional renderings of nuanced activity based on GPS data alone. Maybe enlightened engineers who know about such things will have no trouble buying into all this electronic wizardry. The lay viewer, however, may find Chord's wildly advanced technologies hard to swallow.

The omniscient stranger on the phone is nothing new. (See, e.g., Liberty Stands Still, Phone Booth, even Wood’s recent thriller Grand Piano.) Chord is pretty much a rehash of his predecessors, except his weapon is extreme hacking prowess rather than a sniper rifle. He appears all but omnipotent thanks to his total control over every environment Nick ventures into. Chord knows all and sees all. He is plugged into every surveillance camera in the world and, for good measure, he has placed additional cameras and incendiary traps of his own in a seemingly infinite number of strategic locations. He has Nick pretty well locked down.

Yet, when an unaffiliated hacker clique busts into Nick’s computer and begins communicating with him, potentially derailing Chord’s plans, the king of all hackers is utterly unaware. Somehow a criminal mastermind who makes Keyser Soze look like Zoolander manages to miss three goofy Frenchmen having long video chats with his plaything.

The technical acrobatics and elaborate shot coordination are impressive enough to draw focus from plot failings and logical inconsistencies. As a bonus, Vigalondo uses the whole shiny package to offer a thoughtful critique aimed not just at surveillance states but, more directly, at the culture of anonymous Internet users that have become shockingly comfortable with dehumanizing strangers. This last part is far more topical than the overused surveillance paranoia thing given the recent spate of celebrity hackings and the gleeful throngs of casual voyeurs who don’t see human beings in those stolen private photos, but rather commodities they have every right to do with as they please.

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The Verdict

Biting criticism of Internet voyeurism and celebrity hate-worship add value to an aesthetically novel but otherwise recycled thriller. A strong performance by Elijah Wood and impressive technical directing by Nacho Vigalonda keep the tension high even as leaps in logic become increasingly prevalent.